“Shut up, miss. You know you are.”
“Jonathan.”
“You can bring your friend.”
Carmen turned to Julia, who looked unmistakably excited by this idea. “Do you want to?” Julia asked Carmen.
Carmen didn’t, actually.
“I just think it would be fun to see it,” Julia said.
Carmen gave Jonathan a look. “It’s supposed to be reserved for Equity actors,” she said. “But if the prince here is so eager to eat with us, he can get takeout and bring it to the lawn.”
Jonathan shook his head. “I am overmatched,” he said. “Fine, Carmen, I’ll meet you on the lawn.”
“Give those apprentice girls a thrill,” Carmen said wryly.
To Julia’s delight, Jonathan did meet them on the lawn, the grassy area beyond the canteen where all the apprentices hung out. He brought three turkey sandwiches that tasted to Carmen exactly the same as the ones you got at the canteen.
His presence there did cause a stir. It seemed most of these people were more up to date with his filmography than Carmen. Julia chatted happily with him, discussing each thing he’d acted in.
Watching Julia, Carmen felt a certain mystery being solved, and she was relieved by it. Julia had become friendly again, Carmen realized, because she believed Carmen could connect her to real actors.
Carmen could have been annoyed by it, but for some reason she wasn’t. So Julia was using her. So what. It was much better than the silent treatment.
Only in the last couple of days had Carmen acknowledged to herself just how painful it was to live with someone who wouldn’t speak to you. She thought with earnest regret of the times she’d doled out that particular punishment to her mother.
Carmen had been unhappy with the fraught silence, but she’d also been uneasy about Julia’s recent turnaround. Now that she understood it, she felt much better.
Later she saw Jonathan backstage and she thanked him. “The sandwiches stank, but I think my friend really appreciated your eating with us.”
He laughed. He’d taken to touching bits of Carmen when he could, and he did it now, pulling on the end of a curl of her hair. “No problem, sister.”
“Only now she wants to know what you’re doing for dinner tonight.”
Jonathan laughed again. “Yeah, well. Your friend is what we call a striver. You see a lot of that type in L.A.”
Well, Bridget had dug down to the bottommost thing. The most crushing thing. It was good to know where the bottom was, she thought, lying in her cot that night. She was a lying duck, lying at the bottom and letting the agony come for her. She was accepting it.
Peter had said she could learn a thing or two from the Greeks, and he was right. The Greeks knew about cycles of misery. They knew about family curses passed down through long generations. Even seemingly forgivable infractions started wars, infidelities, the sacrifice of children. They also ended in wars, infidelities, the sacrifice of children.
No—in fact, they didn’t end that way. They didn’t end at all. In the stories, the destruction kept on going, propagated by the blind bungling of human failure.
And that was the course she was setting for herself. Her family was unhappy. No family was allowed to be happy. On some level she didn’t want Peter—or anyone—to have what she didn’t have. She didn’t even want his children to have it.
Now she wondered. Did the fact that Peter had a family dampen her interest in him? Or did it inflame it? How chilling that her most destructive impulses should mask themselves as romance.
Those blind, bungling Greeks always seemed to make the same mistake. They failed to learn from the past. They swaggered onward. They refused to look back. That was what she did too.
Tibby cut back her work hours. Or Charlie recommended she cut back her hours, more accurately. He thought if she worked less, she might be more patient with the customers. He hired a girl who wore scented lip gloss and tiny pants and didn’t care about which movies were good or bad. Charlie was too nice to fire Tibby outright.
Tibby didn’t mind that much. She didn’t have anyone to go out to dinner or to the movies with these days, so she didn’t need the money as much. It gave her more time to work on her script. Or at least to open the file named “Script.”
In late July she went home for a long weekend. Katherine and Nicky were doing a variety show at their day camp, and she thought she’d surprise them.
Would she see Brian? That was what she wondered as her train chugged southward and still wondered later as she waited for her mom to pick her up at the Metro station in Bethesda.
She would see him. She felt sure she would. How could she not? Brian loved her family. In fact, he appreciated them much more than she, an actual member of it, did and was appreciated much more in return. How was she going to feel about that now?
Indeed, on Friday morning, Brian appeared in the kitchen when Tibby was eating her Lucky Charms.
“Hi! Hi!” Katherine danced around him excitedly. “Are you taking us today?”
Was Brian surprised to see Tibby? She wasn’t sure. At first she’d assumed he’d shown up with the idea of seeing her, but now, judging by the look on his face, she wasn’t sure he’d known she’d be there.
“Hey, Tibby,” he said.
“Hey.” She kept her eyes on the little marshmallows. She wanted to be friendly, but she didn’t want to lead him on.
“Brian takes us on Friday sometimes instead of Mom,” Katherine explained happily. She had completely abandoned her own cereal in favor of Brian.
Tibby heard her mother upstairs yelling at Nicky to stop playing on the computer and get dressed. “Well, that’s really nice,” Tibby said stiffly. “You should eat your breakfast, Katherine,” she added. She couldn’t imagine volunteering to take her brother and sister to camp, and she was the one who supposedly shared their DNA.
But then, Brian didn’t have any brothers or sisters. Desire came from deficit, and Tibby had a surplus.
“How come you’re not hugging anymore?” Katherine asked, looking from Brian to Tibby and back.
Moments passed. Brian let Katherine stomp around on his shoes but did not answer the question. Tibby kept her pink face turned to her cereal bowl.
“Are you in a fight?” Katherine persisted. Now she appeared at Tibby’s leg, both hands on one of Tibby’s knees, leaning into her.
Tibby clutched her teaspoon and stirred. The combination of the pink hearts, yellow moons, blue diamonds, and so on turned the milk a sickly gray hue. “Not in a fight,” she said. “Just…doing different things this summer.”
Katherine did not immediately accept this answer.
“Do you want to come?” Brian asked Tibby politely.
“To…?”
“To take us to camp!” Katherine got right on board. “Yes. Can you come?”
“Well. I guess I could—”
Minutes later, Tibby found herself in the passenger seat of her mother’s car with her ex-boyfriend, who was driving her brother and sister to camp. But the true awkwardness began once the two noisy passengers had gotten out of the car.
“How’s it going?” Brian asked into the silence.
He seemed more comfortable than she felt. But he wasn’t the guilty one, was he?
“Pretty good. How about you?”
“Doing a little better, I guess. I’m trying to.” He was willing to be honest and she wasn’t. That was why she didn’t want to have a conversation with him.
She couldn’t think of anything to say. They were stopped at the longest red light on record. She had always hated this light on Arlington Boulevard. Why had Brian gone this way?
“How’s it going with school and everything?” she asked finally.
“What do you mean?” he asked. At last they were moving again.
“With financial aid and that stuff.”
“I probably won’t need it.”
“Really? But I thought—” She was inside the conversation now.
“At Maryland, it’s—”
“No, at NYU, I mean,” she said.
He didn’t say anything for a while.
She wished she could take back her words, remove herself once again from the interaction at hand.
“I’m not planning to go to NYU anymore,” he said slowly, just as they were turning onto her block. “I withdrew my acceptance a couple weeks ago.”
She was opening the car door before it had fully stopped. “Right. Sure.” She forgot for a moment it was her mom’s car and Brian would be parking it in her driveway. “That makes total sense. Of course,” she said. She was flustered, spasmodically waving to him from the sidewalk on her way into her house.
He was looking at her, but she wasn’t sure of his expression, because she wasn’t really looking at him.
“I hafta run. So I’ll see you later!” she declared as she disappeared into her house.
She walked up to her room and sat stiffly on her bed. She looked out the window but saw nothing.
Of course Brian wasn’t going to NYU! He was only going because of her, and she’d broken up with him!
Brian, it seemed, had accepted the reality of their breakup. That much was suddenly clear.
But had she?
When Carmen got home after rehearsal ended that night, she was struck to see that Julia had left a stack of books for her on her bed.
“That one is about the Elizabethan stage in general,” Julia said eagerly, pointing to the first one Carmen picked up. “The big one under it, that’s about language and pronunciation. That will be really helpful. Then there’s that one, which is just an analysis of Winter’s Tale.”
Carmen nodded, studying them. “Wow, thank you. These are great.”
“I think they might be useful,” Julia said.